I've got a Maxtor Shared Storage II (RAID1 mode) which has developed some hardware failure, apparently: it fails to boot properly and is unreachable via network.

When powering it on, it keeps making clunking/chirping disk noise and then sort of resets itself (with a flash of orange light in the usually-green LEDs); it then repeats this as if stuck in a loop. In fact, even the power button does nothing now – the only way I can affect the device at all is to plug in or pull out the power cord!

^{(To be clear, I've come to regard this piece of garbage (which cost about 460 €) as my worst tech purchase ever. Even before this failure I had encountered many annoyances about the drive: 1) the software to manage it is rather crappy; 2) it is way noisier that what this type of device should be; 3) when your Mac comes out of sleep, Maxtor's "EasyManage" cannot re-mount the drive automatically.)}

Anyway, the question at hand is how to get my data out of it? As a very concrete first step, is there a way to open this thing without breaking the plastic casing into pieces? It is far from obvious to me how to get beyond this stage; it opens a little from one end but not from the other. If I somehow got the disks out, I could try mounting the disk(s) on one of the Macs or Linux boxes I have available (although I don't know yet if I'd need some adapters for that).

(NB: for the purposes of this question, never mind any warranty or replacement issues – that's secondary to recovering the data.)